With the advent of video recording technologies and of suitable media for storing such recorded video content, it has become common for individuals to possess an assortment of such recorded video content. For example, video tapes, such as analog or digital tapes, and digital video disks (DVDs) are readily available for purchase, enabling consumers to collect television shows, movies, sporting events, and other entertainment stored on these types of media. Consumers may, therefore, steadily amass a collection of televisions shows, movies, events, and so forth, through the continued purchase of such video tapes or DVDs. An individual's collection of video footage may also include television shows and events recorded by the individual onto video tape, DVD, or a digital video recorder (DVR). In addition, an individual's collection of video footage may include personal footage created by the individual using a camcorder, when such footage is stored on an analog or digital video tape, a DVD, or a magnetic memory card. In these various ways an individual may, over time, amass an extensive collection of purchased or created video content on a variety of different types of storage media.
As new types of storage media and formats arise, however, an individual may find themselves having to maintain a variety of different players in order to maintain access to the different media upon which their various videos are stored. In such circumstances, the individual may transfer contiguous or non-contiguous video content onto a common media type, such as by transferring video footage saved on video tapes onto DVDs. For example, an individual may copy the contiguous contents of a video tape to a DVD, essentially making a DVD version of the video tape. Alternatively, the individual may copy non-contiguous video content, such as excerpts from a video tape or from multiple video tapes, such that the resulting DVD contains only the desired video content from one or more video tapes.
This approach has the advantage of allowing the individual to discard older video player technologies, such as video cassette recorders (VCRs), and to take advantage of the benefits associated with the newer media technologies. Transferring a video from one media type to another, however, may be a laborious process, particularly if only select portions of the video content are to be transferred. For example, to transfer the video content on a video tape to a DVD, the video output of a VCR player may be connected to the video input of a DVD recorder such that the entire content of video tape may be recorded onto a DVD by simultaneously playing the video tape in the VCR and recording on the DVD recorder. However, if only select portions of the video tape are to be transferred, an operator must be present to record only the desired portions of the video onto DVD and to prevent recording of the undesired portions of the video. Alternatively, the functions of video tape playback and DVD recording may be combined into a single device; however, even in such a combined device, unsupervised recording of only portions of the video tape is not possible absent some amount of operator intervention.